ISLAMABAD – Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD) Pakistan in collaboration with OXFAM Novib has launched the “Climate Change Portal Pakistan” to disseminate research and sectoral papers on climate change. The portal aims to raise climate change awareness on various themes by publishing materials authored by Pakistani and non-Pakistani researchers/writers. The portal will host project reports, policy briefs, country position papers and the government policy documents on sectors associated with and affected by climate change.The portal will also serve as a source of news for national and sub-national events on climate change. According to LEAD Pakistan Climate Change Coordinator Arif Rahman, “climate change research in Pakistan is in its infancy. The climate change online portal will bring together resources that will help researchers engage in meaningful research on climate change issues in Pakistan, and will add to the growing realisation that besides being a scientific issue, climate change is significantly a development issue as well.” The portal features several themes such as adaptation, mitigation, disaster risk reduction (DRR), low carbon development, resilience, and climate finance. It also covers various sectors such as health, energy, water, transport, in addition to a section on policy updates featuring policies on forests, water and climate change itself.The portal houses a section on blogs, where people from all walks of life can contribute stories on climate change, discussing how it’s impacting the world and what needs to be done in this regard. The portal launch is part of LEAD Pakistan’s climate change programme, and supplements its recently initiated process of capacity building and program planning on climate change in Pakistan. It contributes to climate change programme objectives of research and initiating policy engagement; capacity building for increased stakeholder engagement; creating and managing partnerships and multi-stakeholder networks; and designing for implementing mitigation and adaptation models and frameworks. The Climate Change Portal Pakistan can be visited at http://ccportal.org.pk/index.php.
